China's impact on the global economy since it embarked on the pursuit of growth through the market three decades ago has been a two-way street. On the one hand, there is the familiar story of how the world's most populous nation and its second biggest economy has exported a stream of cheap manufactured goods with richer nations making up for the deficiencies of domestic demand in what is still quite a poor country. On the other hand, there is the story of China as the biggest buyer of raw materials on a worldwide scale, a resources-poor nation bent on headlong expansion which needs to be fuelled by supply from Africa, the Middle East, Australia, Latin America and neighbours such as Burma.

This second element in China's rise has been recorded in a number of regional studies on Africa and Latin America. Now economist Dambisa Moyo has broadened out the canvas to set China as the core element in her dire warning of a global race for resources as demand for everything from copper to corn outpaces supply.

She marshals an intimidating array of evidence, though her insistence on the growing deficiencies of supply leads her to wave aside such developments as the effects of technology and exploration on energy resources, which have had a habit of confounding the doomsayers. Nor does she chart the use of new metals or the expansion of mining or increased yields reported from new strains of food seeds.

Pursuing her Malthusian course, Moyo calls for co-ordinated international action in response. What form such action would take is unclear. The disappointing outcome of the Rio +20 Earth summit shows again how difficult it is to get disparate countries to agree on concrete steps to deal with major global problems. That said, this book's overall message is one which certainly deserves greater attention that it generally receives.

But Moyo's account of the principal character in the drama she sets out is too limited and needs to be set in context. She fails to provide the essential domestic component in China's resources demand.

For instance, the book takes China's increasing demand for food and land on which to grow it as an external issue whereas it stems in considerable part from the inadequacies of the country's domestic agriculture and the policy priorities of successive governments. Equally, there is no discussion of how the large excess capacity of Chinese industry fuels purchases of hard commodities beyond what the country really needs. As with manufactured goods, China has to "go out" in part because of the weaknesses of domestic policies. It has built up big inventory stockpiles which enable it to act as the market price fixer and produce a whole subset of traders whose purchases may well be sold on world markets rather than ever going to the mainland.

Such factors need to be considered for a fuller assessment of the role of a country in which the authorities often pursue self-defeating policies that have global implications. Nor does Moyo's depiction of China as the winner which will take all in the competition for global resources take sufficient account of the problems, some self-inflicted, which companies from the mainland are experiencing.

Moyo's book is published just as the global "super cycle" in hard commodities appears to be tapering off, in part because of the decline in China's growth rate. An upward cycle in agricultural products may set in if China has a bad harvest and the government relaxes its grain self-sufficiency policy.

But, for all Moyo's insistence that a crisis is inevitable and that China will be the only gainer, we are in uncertain territory here. Forecasting commodity movement is notoriously difficult given the number of factors involved in determining supply and demand. Moyo has rung an alarm bell, but how her warnings will translate into reality remains problematic – as does China's ability to be the winner which takes all.